Moby Chris
I give up. I’m going to stop saying I’ll stop disputing Chris Mooney, because Chris Mooney won’t stop talking bossy patronizing evidence-free nonsense, and I can’t stay away. It’s like trying not to pick a scab. The scab is there! It tickles, it nags, it pulls – how am I supposed to ignore it?! I can’t, so I give up.
I’m reading the book. It’s very short and very easy to read in a sense – but in another sense it’s very hard to read, so I’m going slowly. It’s hard to read in the sense that the mental atmosphere stifles me after a few pages, and I have to stop. There’s also a lot of annotation to do, which slows things down.
Meanwhile – there’s yet another offensively condescending hectoring bossy smarmy post in which Chris tells Jerry Coyne how to be more like Chris. This comes after – what is it now? A week? Two weeks? Is that all? It feels like months – of Chris ignoring all reasonable serious probing questions about how he knows what he keeps claiming to know, what he means when he tells Jerry in particular and ‘new’ atheists in general to be more civil, to not flail at religion, to talk and write in a different way, and similar gaps in our understanding. Many people have asked him such questions, and he just ignores them all and goes on repeating his original claims over and over and over again. I find this profoundly exasperating. He really needs to answer these questions, because he’s busily telling people off in public, so he has a duty to pay attention to their questions and to answer them.
Today’s sermon was on this text:
What good is trying to communicate about science and reason if you can’t get non-scientific audiences to listen to you?…But how long do we have to keep making the same mistake, of trying to defend science and reason in a manner that we ourselves find persuasive, but that does not appeal to non-scientific audiences or even grasp where they are coming from?
I pointed out (knowing it was futile, because he won’t answer me, because he literally never does) that he is as usual treating audiences as a bloc and ways of appealing to them as a dichotomy as opposed to a range of possibilities. The book does exactly the same thing. It’s not convincing.
Unsolicited Advice:
Hmmm. I recognize the problem. He clenches the dummy in his jaws and won’t give it up.
He either growls at you or playfully runs away, ignoring your calls.
You might try rolling up a newspaper and wacking him on the head to get his attention. Then say in a firm, calm voice, “Mooney, release.” In this action, try not to be strident to the degree he rolls over and pees on himself.
Mmm. You gave it a good, honest go, Ophelia. I think maybe you’re closer to being convinced Mooney really is a politician, not an honest interlocutor?
Pangloss Dog’s post must have been ringing in my head when I wrote mine. Still laughing heartily, Pangloss! Almost peeing myself.
I’m starting to get the sense that this is just common practice when it comes to The Serious People.
At least Mooney doesn’t routinely censor comments he doesn’t agree with, as Coyne evidently does.
But Mooney does randomly delete comments on his blog.
Case in point: “Swing and a miss, kwok.”
…was deleted for the sin of being a personal attack, apparently.
Hey gillt, fellow Kwok refugee,
Was it your post that was deleted? What was the gist of it?
I spoke too soon. Though I’m not incredibly surprised; Mooney doesn’t appear to be much interested in engaging in friendly debate, let alone protecting it. Not does he notice a baseball metaphor when he sees it, I guess.
Seriously, what kind of intellectual climate is this, with respect to either of them? I mean, didn’t we just spend the past week going on about how offensive Mooney is for maybe almost sort of told Coyne and others to shut up? How does that reaction compare with Coyne actively deleting and banning good faith comments that he deems unworthy of being seen by the eyes of his readers? What’s to be afraid of?
this was my entire comment,
“Swing and a miss, kwok.”
Part of me wants to chalk it up as a mistake, but since that’s the only comment deleted and he asked that we everyone reread the comment policy, it has be baffled.
Ben, I don’t think I understand. You seem to be saying both that Coyne does, and does not, delete comments. Can you tell me which it is?
If you believe he deletes comments, how did you come to that belief? Did you put up a comment on Coyne’s blog only to see it disappear? I’m asking honestly, not to be provocative.
Wow gillt. . that is baffling! I can’t see how that “went over the line,” as Chris put it. Really, honestly – I don’t see how that could be characterized as a personal attack.
Kwok (and his doppelganger, McCarthy) have been explicitly hostile, labeling other commenters as “Militant Atheists,” labeling them (yes them, not their ideas) as inane, dense, and stupid. Why doesn’t this trouble Chris, if, as he claims, he’s honestly interested in civility?
Just more evidence that he’s a dishonest politician. He really needs to be called out on that, too, since he markets a nice-guy persona.
I posted a comment on “Why Evolution is True” that essentially pointed out that Coyne’s “find a truth found only by faith” contest was problematic for reasons that were posted by the very first poster in that thread. This was evidently so offensive that he rejected the comment from posting, and (I was surprised and dismayed to discover) also banned my email account.
So I just recently posted another, longer post from a different email account, along the same vein. (I’ll post it here so folks can know the kind of content we’re dealing with.) I wonder if this will upset his tastes as well.
—–
By all appearances, and as Matt indicated quite early on, your criteria for “winning” are problematic. It appears to be meant only to tease those who disagree with you on the question of “access to different truths”, not to actually provide any rational argument in favor of the NOMA critic.
I take it that you formulate the idea of “knowledge” with an accent placed on the feature that ultimately makes us justified in holding that our claims are true. I shall assume this because the alternative (knowledge with respect to the origins of evidence) would moot your canonical examples of divine revelation and so forth, since they’re presumably a mish-mash of life experiences that go through the meat grinder of the imagination.
The notion of “secular reason” is hopelessly unclear. A secular argument can be easily transformed into a religious one by retooling premises. If a formerly secular argument is still valid after being altered (though arguably unsound or lacking cogency), is it still “secular reason”? When you get right down to it: is the mere drawing of an inference supposed to be “secular reason”? If so, many interesting arguments for faith are ruled out on trivial grounds. We have to assume that you don’t mean much by “secular reason”, or at least it needs to be spelled out with more care.
Most importantly, defenders of NOMA would likely say that your language of “this or that alone” misunderstands their arguments. Most arguments for faith gain potency by an admixture between reason, faith, and evidence. The Watchmaker argument is an argument (hence reason); and derives some justification from evidence, in a sense of noticing patterns in the world; and obviously faith plays a large role in justification as well. It is, of course, not a good argument — it does not yield a true claim to knowledge, or even a justified one — but it is an argument that can motivate NOMA. Yet, curiously, you only include arguments that make the case on “faith alone” and so forth, therefore forcing us to indulge in beating the weakest argument when we can easily do better.
Ultimately, it seems to me that if you were truly confident in your position, I don’t see why you would phrase your contest in the way you have.
I gotta believe it was a technical mistake, though.
The comment before mine had someone telling kwok to pull his head out of his ass, which was figuratively accurate, but still…
And McCarthy has called me a bigot on numerous occasions. Why not delete that if you’re going to delete something?
As Mooney no doubt enjoys playing the role of a demigod–arbitrarily sending down commandments and condemnations, but never tussling down in the muck with the common rabble–there’s no way to divine his motivations.
That seems like a non-offensive comment to me Ben.
Just as Mooney did with mine, it’s their blog and they can do as they wish. But the arbitrariness of it all is grating nonetheless.
I like Myers approach. Anything but the most mindless hate speech (and he’s very tolerant) he’ll warn them twice in the comments before tossing.
Oh, it’s certainly their space. But it’s worse than being told to shut up: it’s being shutted up, end of story. Without honestly holding themselves to some kinds of self-regulated norms about who to silence and when, we can’t pretend that these are spaces that are friendly to rational debate.
I think this is ironic, since the crux of the real problem with American science and the popular mind is the erosion of liberal attitudes, and in particular, the trivialization of debate in the popular mind. When people adopt an attitude that those who debate are like the petty lawyers of philosophical trivia, they adopt relativistic sorts of stances and foster an apathy towards standards of justification. This indifference can only be enhanced when those who are supposed to have credibility as intellectuals fail to be reasons and questions responsive; everyone just shrugs and says, monkey see, monkey do.
I much prefer the Rosenhouse’s, Moran’s and Hrynyshyn’s way of blogging. Responding to feedback is a good thing, and it more often translates into progress instead of the situation we’re witnessing between Benson and Mooeny or Mooney and Coyne.
Sorry, I disagree about comments. I think energetic moderating is necessary to keep a busy blog from collapsing into an unreadable mess. The criteria aren’t necessarily limited to aggression and the like – they may include cogency, conciseness, clarity – aesthetic criteria of various kinds.
Rosenhouse (very wisely, in my view) limits some people to one comment per day; that’s much the same thing as deleting comments simply because they’re too long, wordy, opague, repetitive, and the like – except that it saves people the trouble of writing posts which then disappear – but then one can always save one’s own comments, so that’s not much of a difference.
Moderating is certainly necessary, but if Jerry Coyne also banned Ben Nelson for a shorter comment along the same lines as the one he’s posted here then that’s a bit troubling, I reckon.
Moderating is certainly necessary, but if Jerry Coyne also banned Ben Nelson for a shorter comment along the same lines as the one he’s posted here then that’s a bit troubling, I reckon.
I don’t find it troubling at all, for the simple and obvious reason that there are plenty of comments at Jerry Coyne’s blog that take an opposing view.
What, banning someone? Not deleting a single comment, but ‘nope, don’t want to hear from you, ever’? I count myself on Coyne’s side in the accomodationist argument, but that’s harsh.
Sorry about the double post, btw.
Huh? Then why, OB, do you act perplexed when Mooney doesn’t address your critique in his blog’s comments section?
It’s completely reasonable that his criteria could be the exactly the same as those you gave–cogency, clarity, conciseness–as justification for deleting a comment.
Mooney ignores you, Coyne deletes Nelson: You’re both flummoxed. What’s the difference?
Ah, okay, I was talking about deleting, not banning. I’m much slower to ban than I am to delete. Banning I don’t know; maybe it was an accident.
“It’s completely reasonable that his criteria could be the exactly the same as those you gave–cogency, clarity, conciseness–as justification for deleting a comment.”
Well, no, frankly. I am generally clear and concise. I may be wrong, but I am not obscure or diffuse. And the comments in this case were definitely cogent: they go to the heart of what Mooney leaves out.
I know that sounds conceited, but – well it’s actually not a very large claim. I’m not saying my comments were brilliant or dazzling or witty or anything like that, but they were those three things.
And then there’s the fact that Chris sent me a copy of the book, so I take it that he considers me part of the conversation. That makes it odd (I think) that he ignores all my questions. I’m not exactly the same as, say, Kwok.
Ophelia,
I suppose that it’s conceivable that he set a cap on multiple comments in a 24 hour period. But when I posted today I received an error message of “post discarded” or suchlike, which sounds like something else entirely.
Aesthetics is pretty well understandable for newspapers, because there’s a strict character limit for fairly practical reasons. But it’s pretty difficult to understand when we’re dealing with blogs (I can just scroll past John Kwok if he’s annoying), and is especially difficult to comprehend when in response to a one-sentence post.
Whether or not he sees fit to entertain other disagreements is not quite the issue, as far as I’m concerned. The issue is, What are the preconditions for making a Third Culture, a culture of rationality — and how would we pave the way to do that, starting with this conversation right here? This forces us to consider answering fairly unpopular and sometimes touchy questions like: what constitutes silencing activity, and to what extent can it be justified? And I’d love to try to give my answers, but it’s somewhat more difficult when the norms that distinguish Good Silencing from Bad Silencing appear to be more in flux than a Heraclitean river.
Well, Ben, I don’t know Jerry reacted as he did. I wouldn’t have reacted in that way to that particular comment. However, given the number of long rants that he must receive accusing him of bad faith, I can imagine that this looked like just another one. Re-read your first and last paragraphs.
Or maybe it was something else. As I say, I don’t know.
For myself, I am far more likely to be pissed off at stuff I see about myself on the internet that speculates uncharitably about my psychological motivations than at stuff that simply disagrees with/attempts to refute my arguments – though it’s also true that my arguments are often misrepresented, which likewise doesn’t make me feel chirpy and bright and kind-hearted towards the world.
Ben,
I really disagree about just scrolling past. That gets to be a pain very very quickly, and it puts one off the blog because it’s a pain. There are a lot of blogs I don’t read, and some that I don’t read as much as I otherwise would, because of clogging by irksome comments. The fact that it’s possible to post long comments doesn’t mean it’s desirable.
Ophelia, it pretty much depends. Sometimes things need to be unpacked so that needless disagreements can be pre-empted. But the comment that I was banned for was entirely short (one sentence), and in effect asked him why he persisted with claiming victory over the contest when it was quite contested. Also I find some long comments quite useful, Josh and Eric here for example. The reason I stopped reading Kwok was that everything he said was a Star Trek reference. Also because evidently everyone says to him is “inane”.
Russell, I should clarify that that was my second comment (after I was banned from one email account and switched to a new one). I agree there’s a tiny bit of sting to those paragraphs, but that was intentional. It’s impossible to convey a point to someone without a bit of force behind it, especially when you more or less presume (plausibly) that they’re about to ignore you if you aren’t entirely explicit. I’ve tried being overly accommodating before, but I find that the results are universally poor; for if you leave it to nuance, the listener gets lost in amphibole; and doesn’t have any stake in a reply anyway. It certainly wasn’t an attack on his motives, since I don’t do that kind of thing (too close to a genetic fallacy). But I think a challenge needed to be made, and made explicitly, since I have reason to believe (due to repetition in spite of challenge) it was an error that he wants to persist with.
The only comments that I delete on purpose are ones that are insulting or ad hominem (and I often will write a private email urging rewriting and resubmission) or ones in which somebody just rails about how evolution is wrong and dumb. (I also delete threats and an occasional fundamentalist raving.) If a comment got lost or deleted that wasn’t one of these, it must have been an accident, and I urge resubmission. As somebody pointed out, I don’t delete negative comments because I get plenty of them!
Hi Jerry, thanks. My second comment essentially has the same message as the first, though with more grounding, so no harm done?
There we go, all cleared up.
Ben, yes, some long comments are terrific – add G to the list. Others can be just self-indulgent. I don’t usually delete them, but I certainly reserve the right to, if I ever get infested. Kwokkian posts would be right out, for example.
OB: “…I am generally clear and concise. I may be wrong, but I am not obscure or diffuse. And the comments in this case were definitely cogent: they go to the heart of what Mooney leaves out.”
Personally, I agree with this.
Perhaps Mooney imagines your points are addressed in his book, or they aren’t worth his time; I have no idea, but I think what I said still stands: both your and Nelson’s perplexity/frustration is similarly rooted.
I can sympathize as much.
You know what, scratch that last comment. It feels like hairsplitting at this point.
Much apologies.
No problem Gill.
I hope he doesn’t think my questions are addressed in the book, because they are so not. That’s one of the problems with the book, and a major reason I keep asking.
I found it appalling that Mooney banned you even when your comments did not contain profanity or personal attacks and actually included some rather cogent questions.